1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a non-standard register of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) devices, especially to use a standard command with an unused input parameter to drive the SATA device to read value of the non-standard register or write data into the non-standard register.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to progress of information technology and prosperous development of the computer system, users have higher requirements for transmission and heat dissipation efficiency of computer peripherals. Thus the SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) specification is developed in order to meet users' requirements of computer peripherals.
The SATA standard interface dramatically improves the transmission and heat dissipation efficiency of computer peripherals. However, in order to assure stability and extension of computer peripherals, during development process of computer peripherals, error detection and efficiency analysis of computer peripherals are getting more important. Thus research and development staff arranges non-standard registers inside the computer peripherals so as to detect the status of peripherals or turn on/off the peripherals. By reading or changing values of these non-standard registers, analyzing process is executed.
These non-standard registers are hidden inside computer peripherals and main computer unit provides a standard interface that is only applied to registers defined by that standard interface. Thus for saving these non-standard registers of computer peripherals, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) or Inter Integrated Circuit (I2C) is used. A system chip of computer peripherals only needs two pins to read and write non-standard registers. Thus receiving pins are used to receive values of non-standard registers being intended to be read and write and then transmitting pins are used to transmit contents of non-standard registers. However, such kind of method can only be applied to computer systems with Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) or Inter Integrated Circuit (I2C) for retrieving values of non-standard registers. Therefore, it's less flexible on applications.
Furthermore, some manufactures use Vender specific commands to write into non-standard registers inside the standard interface device. Yet in standard specification of SATA, only part of Vender specific commands are set for use. Once most of the Vender specific commands is set to have specific function, there is not enough Vender specific commands when research and development staff want to use the Vender specific command to define the standard interface device for executing reading and writing commands of non-standard register.